Is it important for you to own a 51% stake in your company?

Here's what Guy Kawasaki, CEO of Garage Technology Ventures, has to say in his Forbes.com column:

The party that owns 51% of a company does not control it, other than on paper--and, maybe, in their minds. The moment you take $1 from outside investors, you are working for them. At the end of the day, your dream should be to hold 5% to 7% of a huge company, not 51% of a trivial one. To build a huge company, you do what you have to do, including bringing in investors who can help you. These investors will require a larger ownership than your, individual one.

How I Raised Funding - Priyanka Agarwal, Wishberry

You have to be confident and shameless while crowdfunding. Priyanka Agarwal, Wishberry shares on how to succeed in crowd funding with Venture Intelligence in this interview. Priyanka also candidly shares how the team built Wishberry, raised funding from top angel investors like Rajan Anandan, on pivoting, and difficulties in raising capital for entrepreneurs operating in niche spaces not chased by VCs. Q: What does Wishberry do? Priyanka Agarwal : In its latest avatar, Wishberry has pivoted into crowd financing of low budget films (INR 1-5 Cr). We are essentially trying to create an internet platform for investment opportunities for HNIs in films including Marathi, Tamil, Kannada, or films targeting the global diaspora. L-R: Co-founders Anshulika Dubey & Priyanka Agarwal, Wishberry Given that you are building a marketplace, how did Wishberry solve the Chicken and Egg problem? Beyond the “all or nothing” model what did Wishberry do to pull in more artistes and inves

WTP: A Very Important Business Abbreviation

Did you know the most profitable car of sports car maker Porsche is actually its family friendly SUV Cayenne? Wait what! How? Enter building to Customer's Willingness to Pay (WTP). In a FirstRound.com post Madhavan Ramanujam, Simon-Kucher & Partners , shares the story of Porsche's counter-intuitive move in the mid 1990s. In the mid 1990s Porsche's annual sales were a third of what they’d been the decade earlier when it almost died. The company badly needed a turnaround. So Porsche "designed the car around what customers needed, valued and were willing to pay for – in short, around its price. All the items customers weren’t willing to pay for, like Porsche’s famous six-speed racing transmission, were thrown out, even if their engineers loved them." In contrast Fiat Chrysler, which was also looking for a hit, " focused its development process on engineering and design, settling on a price for the car at the very end . Market performance wa

How doing Outsized Partnerships led Karadi down the Wrong Path

Business Line has a fascinating account of the travails faced by Chennai-based children's entertainment and education brand, Karadi Tales, in its search for strategic / financial partners. Viswanath has been fire-fighting to keep afloat Karadi Tales (now a unit of Karadi Path), the company he and his wife Shobha founded in 1996. A distribution agreement with Times Music had landed them in court. And the merger with ACK Media (publishers of Amar Chitra Katha) and subsequent acquisition by Kishore Biyani’s Future Ventures didn’t pan out as expected. ...The partnership (with Times Music) turned sour when there was a change in leadership at Times Music...When Viswanath cited the exit clause and asked for the agreement to be nullified, his partner refused to oblige and instead took him to court, which issued a stay order. Viswanath and his team, despite founding Karadi Tales, could no longer use the brand. “It took us two years to get out of the case,” says Viswanath, who als

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